"America seems to have figured highly in the team’s thinking. They tell me about Cañon City in Colorado, home to 13 prisons including the Supermax facility, containing some of the country’s most dangerous convicts. This is an area of 36,000 people, the nearby town mostly inhabited by prisoner and guard families, the economy relying on the facilities like a industrial city. Introversion has immersed itself in all this, studying the award-winning web documentary, Prison Valley, which analyses the town and its populace.

I originally watched Prison Valley about six months ago while researching industry within prisons, and found it fascinating. Conceptually the player works for a private prison contractor, initially building small facilities within existing jails but eventually building entire jails and operating them under government grants. I am planning to build an entire chapter within Prison Architect in which you have to setup a prison-industrial-complex, probably doing some combination of mining and fabricating of basic metal items. From a gameplay point of view it works great (like building a factory), but I also am fascinated that this really happens, that a whole city could be so focussed on prison industry. The times when Prison Architect works best is when we meld a real-world issue with some good gameplay mechanics, and let the player think about the morality of that.

I thought the documentary was very well made and immediately sent it to my fellow director Mark Morris. We’ve been using it as research material every since.